An Angel Passes

It is a macabre, cruel power we humans have given ourselves over the lesser beasts in our midst. I mean, specifically, our pets.

I wrote last year of the impending demise of my beloved dog, Angel. I made the decision last weekend to finally put an end to her struggles and indignity…this weekend.

I won’t lay out any more details of her troubles; she was an old dog and had old dog problems. What struck me through the week was the pervasive acknowledgement that these were her last days. It was like a person in the room, an invisible, unpleasant, unmentionable character who waited patiently for the appointed time to take Angel away from me.

Frequent bouts of tears and doubt, and an evil prescience about her future battered me while she blindly went about the business of being a dog, blissfully unaware that she was doing these things for the last time.

But don’t we all? We never know how many beats our hearts have left, or when the car rolls off the assembly line that will be shipped, delivered, purchased and driven into ours. But it was the knowing how much time Angel had left, the scheduling of her final heartbeat, the complicity I felt doing it “behind her back” that wrecked my thoughts and interfered with my work.

And the tears it caused, tears she didn’t understand were for her, let alone understand at all. The mourning process started a week before the vet came to the house. It was mostly at night, bed time, when she always would look at me with those doleful eyes, pleading silently with me not to go upstairs, to stay with her downstairs or to take her up with me. But maybe the week of agony was best.

Not long ago Mrs. Farrago and I had two Dalmatians. Cosmo was hers since he was a puppy. Angel was mine since she was a puppy, and moved with me into Mrs. Farrago’s house back in 1998. Cosmo, two years older than Angel, developed his own set of age-related problems and, in late August of 2004, Mrs. Farrago decided the time had come for him to be done with it. We had consulted weeks earlier with a traveling vet, and on a Saturday we called her. She was available to come the following day, in the early evening to put Cosmo down.

This gave us little more than a day to make our peace with it, to say, hug and kiss our good-byes to him. And he was gone. He wasn’t really my dog, having lived more than half his life before I ever met him. But on that, his last day, I bawled my eyes out as if I had known him since the day he was born. And the next few days were especially difficult.

Angel had been mine since her eighth week of life. She had no concept of life without me; despite my frequent travels, I always returned home. Her appointment set, I was able to ease into the grief a little more, each day becoming a little easier to come to terms with my decision, each day making me, if only slightly, able to grasp the reality that I would soon see her take her last breath.

It didn’t make the very moment any easier to take, as the life left her eyes and her body went slack, but I had, to a degree, prepared myself for the moment. Cosmo helped me get through it, too.

That she go peacefully and calmly were all I could ask for her last minutes, and that’s how she went.

I will remember her and miss her forever.



Angel For Now
October 31, 1993 - April 21, 2007